“A brilliant exuberance carries you through these finely crafted and wonderfully accomplished poems, and a careful focus on that which is most essential to our emotional and moral survival.  You can’t help but sing when you read these poems out loud, and the best of them you will envy.”

– Bruce Weigl

“These poems have such gusto for imagery that Neruda comes instantly to mind. Miller’s rapturous relationship to language infuses his work. He builds longer poems by cascading them down the page, whether in ecstasy or jeremiad. There is also much compassion for larger worlds– suffering in Darfur, New Orleans after Katrina, the incandescent experience of being alive in the natural world. Even humor, rare in contemporary poems, is well integrated and uplifting. To enter this book is to enter wide and deep sensory fields, which create pleasure after serious pleasure. I Should Praise goes a long way toward satisfying the many hungers that comprise the depth and emotional texture of the human condition.”

– Suzanne E. Berger

“In the opening poem in this collection the poet speaks in the voice of the color blue that Marc Chagall used in his paintings. This is the miraculous blue of a sky that can sustain flying goats, pirouetting lovers, and rabbis “wheeling and turning / like geese with torahs.”  This capacious and energetic sense of imaginative freedom is, however, only one color in Julian Miller’s palette. What he says in a poem titled “Dear Family” is also true of many of his poems, and taken together they compose a letter of “bewilderment and surrender” to the love that binds us to one another, especially to parents and children, spouses and lovers, and thus to life on earth and all its tragic limitations. Out of this tension between the desire to soar into the blue and the need to be rooted, Miller creates a poetry of clear-eyed lyricism.”

– Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press)